Free Association: Carson: Good Reading!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

by Sheldon Richman

Carson: Good Reading!

I’m reading Kevin Carson’s Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about it. I’ll have more to report in the coming weeks, but for now let me leave it at this: When I read Carson I get have the same positive reaction I used to get when reading or listening to my libertarian hero and friend the late Karl Hess.
P.S. I can’t resist saying a bit more. I’m not far into the hefty book yet, but what I have covered confirms through massive evidence what my previous reading led me to believe: that the modern American economy is far more the product of government-business collusion than of free markets. Contrary to the way free-marketeers tend to talk, we don’t have an essentially free economy except for a thin interventionist crust that needs to be scraped away. Instead, intervention is woven deeply throughout the economic fabric. Thus our economy would have looked very different had laissez faire been the rule. We can’t undo what has been done, of course, but if all privilege and intervention were abolished, the economy would evolve in a radically different direction than if the State’s favors stay in place.
Libertarians really need to come to grips with this if we are to make a contribution to the continuing debate over political economy. If we keep sounding like Lawrence Kudlow and Ben Stein, we will be irrelevant. And we should be.